Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

“These things, as you call them, are humans, young miss,” said Barnabas. “With names. And friends. And families. It was a mother’s love that caused him to be turned from one type of human to another. We are all more than our conditions.”

  “Quite sentimental of you, Mr. Bothemly, considering,” said Van Helsing.

  “What do you know of me, Dr. Van Helsing?” said Barnabas.

  “I know you work at the Webster law firm and that you have been protecting the monster. But I also know your history. You are as undead as he is, ja, just without the fangs. But my family has been hunting these creatures for generations. We know full well the dangers they pose for humanity. Which is the only reason why this specimen is still alive.”

  “He wants me to spill on the flophouse,” said Keir. “How to get in, get out.”

  “It is a nest we intend to destroy, as we destroyed the nest at this location. And there is a particular monster who has been loose for more than a century, spreading her poison like a plague upon the land. We will not leave until she is dead.”

  “They’re hunting Miss Myerscough,” said Keir.

  “Myerscough is one of the original few infected by Dracula himself during his time in London,” said Van Helsing, “before my great-great-grandfather Abraham finally put him down. Since then, the crimes she has committed are innumerable. We have been chasing this fiend from London to New Orleans and finally to here. It has fallen upon me to finish it. I tried many years ago, and lost an eye to one of those foul vultures in the process. But now I am determined to end her reign.”

  “And you don’t want to help them, Keir?” I said, surprised. There was an angle for Keir to play here, but Keir wasn’t playing it. How unlike him.

  “I might have helped once,” said Keir. “But it all looks different to me now.”

  “She made you a monster,” said Pili.

  “To save my life,” said Keir. “I won’t help you kill her for that.”

  “And that is why, my friends,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “I am glad you have joined us. Maybe you can convince this monster of the rightness of our cause. Or maybe he might give us what we want to protect you from, let us say, your own unfortunate fate.”

  Ahh, there it was. I was only surprised it had taken so long. Dr. Rudolph Van Helsing, the great protector of humanity, was ready to sacrifice a few humans so he could go on killing the unhuman. I looked around for some sort of a plan to get us out of this. There had to be something we could do. We’re not just lobsters in the aquarium, waiting to be boiled. There’s always something.

  “So this is what it’s come to, Pili?” said Olivia. “You’ll kill me if this boy doesn’t talk.”

  “No,” Pili said, looking down now. “I won’t let that happen to you.”

  “What about the others?” said Olivia. “And what about the boy? Your brother would be trying to protect him, not kill him.”

  “And that’s why Travis is dead, O,” said Pili. “That night when we went back, we had saved Travis. Dr. Van Helsing and Dolp and Mrs. Calabash, we all had gone in, fought the demons, and brought him out with us as the fire we set burned. Diego was inside, of course. He had been turned. You saw what they were, what he had become. He needed to die in that fire. But still, Travis fought free of us and went back in to save what he thought was his friend. He never came out again.”

  “Yet you learned nothing from his heroism,” said Olivia.

  “What I learned,” said Pili, “was that mercy is weakness when it comes to them.”

  “It is not about mercy, miss,” said Barnabas. “Nobody here is asking for mercy. And it would be a futile request of the likes of Van Helsing, I have no doubt.”

  “Then what is it about?” said Pili.

  Barnabas glanced my way and then I saw it, a plan, desperate and stupid, but a plan. And all it required was remembering the words told to me by my father and grandfather, by Barnabas, and even by the judge over the course of this misadventure, and then tossing them out like a hooked worm.

  “It’s about due process,” I said.

  “Very good, Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas.

  “What is this due process thing, young lady?” asked Mr. Jack.

  “It’s about having a fair trial,” I said. “Not just a pretend thing with fancy rules that gets the result you want, but a really fair trial with all sides being heard.”

  “A trial, you say,” said Van Helsing, like a fish snapping at the bait. “What a marvelous idea! What fun!”

  He spun around as if searching for something and then pointed his cane at Keir, still taped to the wall.

  “Let us try McGoogan for being an undead monster who feasts on human blood. Ja?”

  “A trial in the Court of Uncommon Pleas?” I said. “Yes, that’s a great idea.”

  “Not in the Court of Uncommon Pleas,” said Van Helsing. “We’ll do it here. Now.”

  “But there’s no courtroom here,” I said, “no judge, no jury.”

  “This will be the courtroom,” said Van Helsing. “And we don’t need a judge. Judge Jeffries is a pompous windbag. Things would run better without him. My crew can serve as jurors, with Mrs. Calabash as the foreperson. It will be Van Helsing battling the famous Elizabeth Webster for the life of Keir McGoogan. Are you ready?”

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. If anyone is to try the case, it has to be Barnabas.”

  “But Barnabas is not a licensed barrister, are you, Barnabas?”

  “No longer,” said Barnabas, “as well you know.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of putting Mr. McGoogan’s fate in the hands of an unlicensed barrister. Nay, Elizabeth, it must be you.”

  “Go ahead, Elizabeth,” said Keir on the wall. “I’m willing to bet on you. No one else I’d rather bet on. Well, maybe Barnabas, but you’re second, I promise.”

  “He’s willing,” said Van Helsing. “How can you turn down the opportunity? A match of wits and law to save the thing you claim as your friend? Are we on?”

  MOCK TRIAL

  Mr. McGoogan,” said Dr. Van Helsing in a loud and dramatic voice, “you were close to dying on the dark and stormy night a hundred years ago when your mother took you to the Château Laveau, ja?”

  “So I’m told,” said Keir.

  “And on that date, to save your life,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “Miss Myerscough bit your neck and turned you into the monster you have become.”

  “Objection,” I said. “Calling Keir a monster kind of gives the game away, don’t you think?”

  “It’s what he is, my dear,” said Mrs. Calabash before slamming her sword on the desktop. “Objection overruled.”

  The office had been transformed into a mock-up of the Court of Uncommon Pleas. The four jurors—Pili, Mr. Jack, Mrs. Calabash, and Dolp—sat at the desk in the front of the courtroom. There was an area before the desk where the lawyers stood while Natalie and Henry and Barnabas, along with Olivia, sat watching from the chairs behind the low table. Beside the desk was a witness chair, which was now empty, as Keir, who had sworn to tell the truth while Mrs. Calabash’s sword was at his neck, remained taped to the wall.

  Up there he looked a little like the ram on the wall behind the judge’s desk in the real courtroom, although Keir wasn’t chewing a licorice twist.

  This wasn’t the plan that had flitted through my mind when Barnabas gave me his glance. I had thought we would buy time before a proceeding in the real Court of Uncommon Pleas, with all its rules and regulations. In this room, with a jury as rigged as one of those old-time ships with all the ropes, due process for Keir seemed as far away as Fiji. But in desperate situations, a girl has to take what she can get, and this was what I had. And was it weird that I felt almost at home in the made-up courtroom, as if somehow this had become my arena?

  “So, to continue where we were before the interruption,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “on that fateful night, Miss Myerscough turned you into a monster. And there are scars on your neck as proof, ja?”

  “I
admit to the scars.”

  “And in the hundred years since, Mr. McGoogan,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “you’ve been a blood-eater, is that not correct?”

  “I eat what I’m served,” said Keir. “At the Château Laveau it was usually gruel. At Elizabeth’s house it is sometimes dead generals.”

  “Dead generals, you say? And how do they taste, Mr. McGoogan?”

  “Sweeter than you’d expect,” said Keir, giving me one of his winks.

  “But you hunger for blood,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “human blood, day and night, ja?”

  “Yes,” said Keir, “there’s no denying it.”

  “You could try,” I said.

  “The blade I swore on was mighty sharp, Elizabeth.”

  “Smart lad,” said Mrs. Calabash.

  “And you think of human blood, constantly,” continued Van Helsing. “You dream of it. You sicken without it, ja?”

  “All of that, yes.”

  “And when your schoolmates stroll past you in the halls of Willing Middle School West, you are thinking of all the blood burbling though their little bodies, is that not true?”

  “That, yes,” said Keir, “along with the jangle of coins in their pockets.”

  “You are a blood-eater, and will always be a blood-eater, as long as you are allowed to walk this earth, is that not correct, Mr. McGoogan? Oh, there is no need to answer. We all know the truth.” Van Helsing turned and bowed to me. “I have no more questions, Ms. Webster. Your witness.”

  No more questions? My witness?

  I had been waiting in dread for what Keir, in his suddenly chatty mood, would end up answering to Van Helsing’s most obvious questions. How had Keir gotten the blood he craved? What crimes had he committed to satisfy his unholy hunger? I was actually as curious as the jury about what he would say.

  But Van Helsing had stopped before getting that answer. Was he stopping before asking the one question too many that might destroy his case? Or was he hoping that I, thinking he was afraid of the answer, would ask the one question too many that would destroy my case? It seemed to me like a flip of the coin on which Keir’s life would depend. Keir might have appreciated the bet, but it had me tumbling in uncertainty.

  Then I remembered what this case was about. It had little to do with Keir. And when I focused on that, I knew exactly what to do.

  “I have no questions for the witness,” I said.

  “No questions?” said Van Helsing. “How strange. And unexpectedly cowardly for the famous Elizabeth Webster. Well then, I have just a few more of my own.”

  “That is not permitted, Dr. Van Helsing,” said Barnabas.

  “Not permitted?” growled Van Helsing.

  “Your direct examination was completed,” said Barnabas calmly. “You can only ask more questions of your witness to clarify something brought up in Mistress Elizabeth’s cross-examination. As there was no cross-examination, you are finished with Mr. McGoogan. Those are the rules.”

  “Whose rules?” bellowed Van Helsing.

  “Are there no rules?” I said, facing the jury, spreading my arms out wide. “No rules?”

  “There should be rules,” said Pili.

  “Every game has rules,” said Mr. Jack.

  “I never liked rules,” said Dolp. “Like brushing your teeth every night. Is that a rule?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Calabash. “That is a rule. And rules are rules. No more questions for this witness from you, Doctor. Do you have another witness?”

  Van Helsing lifted his cane and pointed it at Keir, then lowered it again. “Fine,” he said. “I’ve proven enough. No other witnesses needed. Call whomever you please, Ms. Webster.”

  Everyone in the made-up courtroom looked at me, wondering what I had up my sleeve. I was wondering, too. I took a breath and then said,

  “I call Dr. Rudolf Van Helsing.”

  There was the inevitable commotion—the doctor shouting, Keir laughing, Mrs. Calabash banging her sword on the desktop. As it continued, I looked at Barnabas. He nodded at me, as if I had made the only possible call, and then he glanced at the jury. As Van Helsing sat in the witness chair and swore, at the point of Mrs. Calabash’s sword, to tell the truth, I gave the jury a more careful look.

  How was I to win them over? Pili had been the one to say there should be rules, Mr. Jack had backed her up, and the other two had gone along. In this house, where Pili’s quest to kill the undead had been born, she seemed to be the route to Keir’s freedom.

  As the courtroom quieted, I turned to the witness. “Dr. Van Helsing, you said your family has been hunting what you called ‘these monsters’ for generations.”

  “That is right. We are protectors of humanity.”

  “Do you believe there is any humanity left in Keir?”

  “What existed once has been devoured by what he has become.”

  “So there is no possibility for friendship,” I said, looking at Pili.

  “When a monster like Keir McGoogan looks at a human like you, Ms. Webster, it sees only prey.”

  “How long have you been hunting Keir?”

  “I have been hunting Myerscough my entire life. McGoogan is one of the monsters in her nest, so for him it is the same length of time.”

  “And in all that time, have you ever brought a case against him in a court of law?”

  “Such beasts obey no law.”

  “Have you ever asked a court for and received a warrant for his arrest?”

  “Not for him specifically, nay.”

  “So you’ve been hunting him on your own supposed authority.”

  “Someone must hunt them or they will devour us all.”

  I looked at Pili, sitting at the desk with a stony face. My eyes still on her, I said, “Like you hunted those who died in the fire at this house?”

  “It was a great victory for our cause.”

  “How many died in the fire you set, Dr. Van Helsing?”

  “All of them.”

  “So you don’t know how many died. And you don’t know the names of the dead. But still you are so certain that all of those you burned into ash deserved their fate.”

  “The brother of Pili was hung on the wall as they tried to drain him dry.”

  “What kind of inhuman monsters would hang someone on a wall, I wonder?” I said, glancing up at Keir. “And you were sure that none inside that house were actually trying to help Travis? Like, for example, Diego Acosta? Could he have been trying to save his friend?”

  “He had been turned and he was there, so the answer is nay. I told you they have no friends.”

  “But Travis seemed to think otherwise. Travis ran back into the fire to try to save Diego, didn’t he?”

  “He was deluded.”

  “Maybe his friend had been secretly helping him. Or maybe Travis simply believed that his friend deserved the benefit of the doubt. That his friend was innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See, that’s what I’ve been learning due process is all about. We are always so certain and then, when we ask enough questions, sometimes we find that we were wrong. That’s why we need witnesses. That’s why we have trials in courtrooms with all kinds of rules. That’s why we don’t just go around killing because our daddies did it.”

  “Is there a question in your babble?” said Dr. Van Helsing.

  “How about this one—how are you so certain that Keir is not our friend?”

  “Because he is a monster, with nothing but darkness in his heart. Let me ask you this, Elizabeth Webster. Has Keir McGoogan ever done anything to help you or his other new schoolmates? Has he ever done anything other than lie and deceive you? Has he done anything other than take?”

  I didn’t have to answer his question. In fact, my grandfather had told me a lawyer should never answer a witness’s question. It shows weakness to give up control of a cross-examination. But when I looked at Pili, there was something in her eye, as if she was looking for hope in my answer. I was wondering whether I could give it when I lifted my
head and looked at Keir.

  He turned his face away from me, as if he was embarrassed by what he had become, and it broke my heart.

  He was a boy struck down by an illness, turned into a blood-obsessed vampire, and then imprisoned for a hundred years in a castle with the most brutal of keepers. I had seen up close the wounds all that had caused, as he played dice games to take a friend’s money, as he manipulated others, me included, to do his bidding. Yes, he took and took and took. But there was more than darkness in his undead heart, wasn’t there?

  Wasn’t there?

  “You’re suddenly very quiet for a lawyer,” said Dr. Van Helsing, with an ugly laugh.

  I turned to look at Olivia, knowing that Pili would be following my gaze. “I’m just thinking about what makes someone a friend,” I said.

  Arguments were supposed to come at the end of the trial, but he had asked his question and I could tell that now was the time. I turned to face the jury and spread my arms wide once again.

  “A friend shares, and Keir has certainly done that with me and Natalie and Henry. Maybe not his money—he does like his money—but he shares his games, his adventures, and his past. When he shares memories about things like sunken ships and rich old guys, history comes alive for us in a way no book can match.

  “And a friend lets you see your world through his eyes. Keir didn’t have to go school with us, but he wanted to. He cherishes being with the other kids, the things he can learn, even the ways he can show off. And he does show off. A lot. But when I look at middle school through his eyes, I suddenly feel so lucky to be there. How is that possible?”

  “I asked for an answer,” said Dr. Van Helsing, “not a speech.”

  “You asked and she’s answering,” said Mrs. Calabash, banging her sword on the desk. “Let her finish.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “A friend also makes you feel good about yourself. Keir does that for all of us. I don’t know how he does it, maybe it’s a cunning little trick of his, but when we’re with him we somehow feel like we can do more, be more. Like we’re worth more. If it is only a trick, it’s the best trick a friend can play.

  “And finally, a friend tells you the truth. I know that Keir hasn’t told me everything—I can only imagine the horrors he’s been through. But the only times he’s lied to me, he let me know he was lying so I could figure it out if I wanted to. And whenever he’s made me a promise, he’s kept to it.